Parler sale to Ye feels like a failed company took advantage of another troubled rich guy

What good can come when a troubled social network is sold to a troubled famous rich person? With the sale of Parler to Ye and Twitter to Musk, we are about to find out – twice.

Op-ed by Mike Masnick of Tech Dirt

Ye, formerly Kanye West, has had quite a week or so. He got locked out of both his Instagram and Twitter accounts for posting anti-semitic nonsense. Immediately following that, he went on the Drink Champs podcast/video show and spouted even more such nonsense. He’s continuing to spew similar nonsense in other interviews as well. Indeed, it seems like anyone putting him on right now is really exploiting someone who is dealing with some pretty serious issues.

I’m not one to diagnose someone randomly, though Ye has been open about his bipolar diagnosis and the fact that it is a constant effort to manage the condition.

But then things got even stranger on Monday, as Parlement Technology, the parent company of Parler, announced that Ye was now “buying” Parler. He’s not buying Parlement, which was formed when Parler tried to expand beyond its flailing social network by purchasing Dynascale and claiming that it was now building “uncancelable” cloud services (they’re not the first to try this. They’ve also dabbled in NFTs and other nonsense, none of which seems to be doing well). 

So the deal with Ye is not to buy the company, but to unload the flop of a social media platform that has very few users left as the market for “Twitter-but-for-assholes-removed-from-Twitter” was already pretty small, and is now divided between way too many platforms: Parler, Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, and some other wannabes.

Over at the Verge, they’re reporting that Parlement has been trying to offload Parler for a few weeks now at astronomical prices, while noting that basically no one uses the site any more: somewhere around 50,000 daily active users, which is a rounding error that Elon Musk would sue over on Twitter.

According to a source familiar with the discussions, Parler’s parent company, Parlement, has been trying to offload its social media platform to potential buyers over the last few weeks. One prospective buyer described Parlement’s asking price for the platform as wildly inflated, and said they were stunned by the site’s low number of daily active users. 

[….]

The service currently maintains around 50,000 daily active users, a source familiar told The Verge, compared to hundreds of millions for even moderately sized networks like Twitter and Snapchat.

Put all that together, and this really seems like an opportunistic Parlement taking advantage of Ye, who is upset about his treatment on Instagram and Twitter, who has money to burn, and was talked into taking on this albatross of a failed social media platform to pretend to be creating a site for “free speech.”

Instead, this just looks to be a sad situation, especially given how Ye has been lashing out in his nonsensical rants about others trying to take advantage of him, when the reality is that it’s now that he’s actually being taken advantage of.

HYPEBOT TAKEAWAY: Ye will not revive Parler / Parler will not revive Ye

Kanye West may be a (sometimes) brilliant artist, but thanks to his steady stream of antisemitic and controversial rants and erratic behavior, he is also being abandoned en mass by the companies (Adidas, CAA, UMG, and others) that made him rich. It’s hard to see how he is a turnaround recipe for a failed right-wing social network.

For better or worse, Elon Musk will change Twitter.

Ye + Parler is a footnote at best.